"I do not know, m'sieu'."
"When did you see her last?"
"Four weeks ago, m'sieu'."
"That was September, this is October—winter. On the ranches they let their cattle loose upon the plains in winter, knowing not where they go, yet looking for them to return in the spring. But a woman—a woman and a wife—is different.... Bagot, you have been a rough, hard man, and you have been a stranger to your God, but I thought you loved your wife and child!"
The hunter's hands clenched, and a wicked light flashed up into his eyes; but the calm, benignant gaze of the other cooled the tempest in his veins. The priest sat down on the couch where the child lay, and took the fevered hand in his own.
"Stay where you are, Bagot, just there where you are, and tell me what your trouble is, and why your wife is not here.... Say all honestly—by the name of the Christ!" he added, lifting up an iron crucifix that hung on his breast.
Bagot sat down on a bench near the fireplace, the light playing on his bronzed, powerful face, his eyes shining beneath his heavy brows like two coals. After a moment he began:
"I don't know how it started. I'd lost a lot of pelts—stolen they were, down on the Child o' Sin River. Well, she was hasty and nervous, like as not—she always was brisker and more sudden than I am. I—I laid my powder-horn and whiskey-flash—up there!"
He pointed to the little shrine of the Virgin, where now his candles were burning. The priest's grave eyes did not change expression at all, but looked out wisely, as though he understood everything before it was told.
Bagot continued: "I didn't notice it, but she had put some flowers there. She said something with an edge, her face all snapping angry, threw the things down, and called me a heathen and a wicked heretic—and I don't say now but she'd a right to do it. But I let out then, for them stolen pelts was rasping me on the raw. I said something pretty rough, and made as if I was goin' to break her in two—just fetched up my hands, and went like this!—"